As you may noticed, using Ping to comprehensively diagnose the location of an outage or slowdown can be rather redious. Fortunately, there is a tool that can ease some of that tedium. Traceroute (or Tracert, as the tool is named under Windows). You initiate a traceroute by running the program and passing it the name of the destination host. Every TCP/IP connection between yourself & that host is tested to ascertain both network connectivity & response time. The Traceroute uitility send a special traceroute package to the firts upstream host (normally your TCP/IP gateway), listing the destination of the traceroute. That forst upstream host, if alive, responds to the originator by sending the equivalent of a ping response, with a confirmation of receipt, and forwards the traceroute packet on the next upstream host. This process continues until the destination is reached or the TTL for yje tracetoute packet is exceeded.
Like Ping, The Traceroute utility has a number of cinfiguration options. Traceroute is extremely useful for isolating the point of the network failure, because it can shoe which gateway device is not responding and even reveal whether one port on a gateway device is dead. Traceroute can also show you, with the response time statistic for each response, where network slowdowns are taking place. When used in combination, Traceroute & Ping are, perhaps, the most valuable software tools available to the adminstartor of the TCP/IP network.